quick, before the president can read it. here s what he said tonight about releasing the democratic memo. are you leaning towards releasing it? i would say this is different memo than the first one. it s lengthier. so it will be done in a responsible way. but, again, the first one was very clean, relative to sources and methods. my initial cut is this one is a lot less clean. and then john kelly said something truly extraordinary. he made it sound as if the president would decide to release this memo based on the recommendation of deputy attorney general rod rosenstein is fbi director christopher ray, both of whom the president overruled in order to release the first republican memo. but at the end of it all it ll be guys like rod
as the first one. but, again, back to we essentially got today. the teams are doing exactly the same thing on this one that we did on the fist one. this one is more lengthy, but anyways it would have been nice to have a white house chief of staff who said all those things about the republican memo when they were considering releasing the republican memo. but we have what we have. here s what john kelly said when he was asked about releasing the republican memo before the president even read it. rod rosenstein and the fbi director ray don t want you to release the memo. will you guys? the memo, four pages, came over the day before yesterday. right. did you see it? i did. what d you think? it ll be released pretty quick, and the whole world can see it. it ll be released pretty
rosenstein, chris ray from the fbi, certainly the national security attorneys at the white house giving the president s recommendation on it. joining us now the chief council of the senate judiciary committee, and also a law professor at the university of michigan and nbc news and msnbc news contributor. ron, very surprising to hear that apparently it s all up to rod rosenstein and christopher ray on whether they release the democratic memo. yeah, you know, i mean it s just kind of hard to understand why different rules are being applied this time. but i will say this, i mean, look, they should give it a hard look. and they should be careful to make sure that it s released properly. a big difference here is this memo probably has actual facts in it and true information in it.
investigation was wrongly begun, that it rested on this dossier. you know, all these claims that trump has made from time and time again, you know, the nunes memo who was supposed to back it up actually blew it all up. the schiff memo, and get the other side out, we know enough now to know what s going on here. what s going on here is that the republicans in congress as max alluded to are really going all in to protect the president. and no matter what we do or don t see of the second memo, we ve got enough of a picture to know that for sure. barbara, one of the developments on the committee investigation is that the testimony from steve bannon continues to get delayed. and the latest report we have on it indicates this is actually from adam schiff. i m going to read what he said about this. he said this week steve bannon s council informed the committee they prohibit mr. bannon from testifying to the committee
so probably it does indeed need a harder look than the completely fake made up memo than the president s put together as the legal defense team. in the end i hope they do the right thing and get this memo out there. the president was really big on transparency last week. and let s hope he still believes in transparency this week. there s the white house chief of staff saying they re depending on the advice of the justice department and the fbi, precisely the advice that they overruled in making am republican memo public. well, they conveniently ignored the advice last time when the justice department said it would be extraordinary reckless to release the memo. my guess is they would not like to release the memo. the justice department has never given up the fisa application materials.